Pan-Democrats Lose Crucial By-Election In Hong Kong

A CRUCIAL BY-ELECTION in Hong Kong ended up defeat for the pan-Democratic camp last week, with the loss of pan-Democratic candidate Lee Cheuk-Yan to pro-Beijing candidate Rebecca Chan Hoi-yan in the Kowloon West constituency. If Lee had won, this would have been crucial for the pan-Democratic camp because it would have restored their veto power over the pro-Beijing camp in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, better known as LegCo.

The seat was specifically to fill the seat formerly occupied by Lau Siu-lai, who initially appealed her disqualification but later dropped this. Leung is still appealing, but Lau was not allowed to run again for her seat.

The run-up to elections saw conflict between both camps, including Joshua Wong of Demosisto, as well as pan-Democratic politicians Gary Fan and Charles Mok, disrupting a campaign rally of Chan’s, and both camps shouting at each other in Whampoa.

Over 200,000 votes were cast, with Chan winning over 106,000 votes. Lee won 93,000 votes, with victory likely in part due to the fact that independent candidate Frederick Fung split the vote, winning 13,000 votes. Fung was a former pan-Democratic lawmaker but decided to run as an independent, citing that the pan-Democratic camp did not hold primaries before running Lee. has denied that he split the vote because even if Lee had won his votes, she would have still lost to Chan by 900 votes.

In all, voting saw a low turnout as compared to legislative elections in 2016, and slightly lower turnout than the by-election held in Kowloon West to fill the seat formerly occupied by Yau Wai-ching. This seat was won by pro-Beijing candidate Vincent Cheng, making Cheng the first pro-Beijing lawmaker to win a by-election for a government position since 1992.

Lee Cheuk Yan. Photo credit: 李卓人 Lee Cheuk Yan/Facebook

It may be that low morale pervades in Hong Kong, allowing the pro-Beijing camp to win. While this was probably accentuated by splits in the pan-Democratic camp, it is also highly likely that if a pan-Democratic lawmaker had won, Beijing and its proxies in the Hong Kong government would have found some justification to remove that lawmaker. Beijing evidently hopes for the Hong Kong government to become a rubber-stamp legislature for its political will as soon as possible.

Some have concluded that this means the “China factor” is now irrelevant to the vote and that voters are no longer afraid of China. This may be overstated, but it is probably true members of the pan-Democratic camp in Hong Kong or pan-Green camp in Taiwan can no longer run on platforms in which they are only distinguished from the pro-Beijing camp or pan-Blue camp only on the basis of their greater wariness of China. Similarly, splitting the vote because of internal in-fighting can be highly dangerous, as observed in that in Taiwan, this nearly led to a KMT victory in Taipei.

It is to be seen whether the pan-Democratic camp in Hong Kong or the pan-Green camp in Taiwan will learn any of these lessons going forward. If they do not, obsolescence is almost certainly in the cards.

Brian Hioe was one of the founding editors of New Bloom. He is a freelance writer on social movements and politics, and occasional translator. A New York native and Taiwanese-American, he has an MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and graduated from New York University with majors in History, East Asian Studies, and English Literature. He was Democracy and Human Rights Service Fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy from 2017 to 2018.

About New Bloom

New Bloom is an online magazine covering activism and youth politics in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific, founded in Taiwan in 2014 in the wake of the Sunflower Movement. We seek to put local voices in touch with international discourse, beginning with Taiwan.